I thought you guys might find this interesting.
I’m thinking about moving to Italy and I have a few areas picked out as good candidates. I decided to see what google would give me with the following prompt:
“A drone shot high over Trani Italy, looking down, moving across the town center towards the harbor” using the 3.5 Flash Omni video generator.
What I got was actually far more accurate than I expected. Video generators are like image generators – they synthesize trillions of pieces of data in their training data into weights. They’re not Google Earth, they don’t have a reference map of the whole world. Some famous places get accurately represented the same way the Mona Lisa gets accurately represented in image generators - it’s such a dominant force in its training data that it knows that precise image or close enough. But you would expect a relatively obscure town like Trani Italy to have some data (because it’s beautiful) but not anywhere near the famous areas in Italy that are far more well documented.
But it’s surprisingly accurate. It gets some details wrong. The church on the right of the video is actually a famous church that would appear outside of this field of view to the left. Are the exact placements of the buildings and roads precisely accurate? Not exactly. But it absolutely nails the vibe. Those look like real Apulian buildings, construction materials, design, the way the streets are laid out. It correctly gets the series of narrow alleys leading to the harbor. It gets the shape of the harbor right. The relatively size of the harbor, buildings, and streets and their relative positions. It really feels like Trani and not “generic southern Italian town”
For comparison, here’s the google maps 3d view of that same area – wider and higher up for context. The red circle is roughly where the drone view is. If you compare them to the video, it’s pretty close. You can definitely see a few places where it goes wrong, but what’s impressive is that it’s about 80% right. Which is plenty close enough to get a real feel for the vibe of a place.
